Wendell Berry wrote me a few days before his death that “We’re coming to some sort of end.” And with impish anger, “We send word to the heroes of the institutions that they’re shit out of luck.”

I didn’t realize that Wendell was in his last weeks when I wrote him in late August. We had become neighbors and friends when I started farming in Kentucky in 1973. I wrote to thank him for being who he was in my life. He shared what he was thinking about his own life’s work and his question to himself, “Has it done any good?”  

I shared with Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline, etc.)  some of my correspondence with Wendell, commenting that I hoped to prove Wendell wrong about being “shit out of luck.” Peter wrote back with his own thoughts:

“I resonate with the timeliness of calling collapse collapse, guided by the term as used by indigenous writers like Vanessa Andreotti. It invites us to grieve for the suffering we have created. It tells us that now is not the time for ‘fixes,’ new props to hold up the industrial growth engine. It, perhaps, pierces the illusion of thinking our way out of the mess we have created. People with 10,000 years or longer histories have known collapse before and tried to encode its lessons. seeing the consequences of concentrating power and wealth and forgetting our place in the larger order of things. Unlike us, they learned to shed the illusion that they stand at the top of some pyramid of human accomplishment. This is why the first lesson those who acknowledge collapse have learned is profound humility, and gratitude. And awe at what we are given – for no price other than embracing humility, gratitude, and reverence.”

I find Peter’s reflections reassuring and powerful, helping me shed some of my own hubris. Wendell observed that, “All we’ve got is a good set of instructions about how to live with our neighbors.”

It seems to me that every wise person I know is living this tension between “coming to some sort of end” (in Wendell’s words) and “humility, gratitude, and reverence.” (in Peter’s words)

Like Wendell, my life focus is on agriculture. I’m privileged to work with farmers who frequently notice nature’s capacity to heal from human mistakes. And yet they also can’t help but straddle a tension between what is and what might be. Some of these farmers have huge machinery and farm thousands of acres. Some might be labeled as part of “industrial agriculture,” but they nevertheless preserve wetlands for birds, plant multi-species cover crops to fill the ground with diverse roots, and find great joy in feeling crumbly soil teeming with life. Many more farmers would embrace a more diverse and regenerative agriculture if there were markets for those diverse crops.

And I know dozens of brilliant, committed sustainability professionals who work for food companies, each with influence, but almost none with much authority. Some CEOs of these same companies hope earnestly that sustainability will be central to their legacy, but if the stock value of their companies decline, their boards will ease them out.

Even Wendell and his family lived within a tension between the end of a system and a future not yet born. In his last novel, Marce Catlett, The Power of a Story, he described an event that animated the lives of his father, brother, himself, and his two children. In 1906 Wendell’s grandfather farmed a small hill farm. The family was short on money, but their year’s tobacco crop didn’t earn enough to pay the sales commission. Wendell’s father, John Berry, was still a small boy in that moment, and he committed his life to trying to make sure that families wouldn’t have to face such an ordeal. He helped organize farmers to bargain collectively with the companies, when that didn’t succeed, he worked for a congressman during the writing of New Deal farm programs in the 1930s, and he went on to become president of the tobacco farmers coop, later succeeded by his son John Jr., Wendell’s brother. The tobacco program Wendell’s father helped create was brilliant: it guaranteed that modest size farms had the right to sell their share of tobacco needed by the market, and it guaranteed a minimum price that the companies were required to pay. When I farmed in Kentucky, I also grew tobacco because it was the way all farmers paid for their farms from hand labor on a few acres, while living on whatever else they did, in my case milking cows. Tobacco sustained farmers, and it also sustained thousands of communities.

You will observe, of course, that growing tobacco was contributing to cancer. Yes, making people sick while also sustaining the most vital small farm economy in the United States. Farmers didn’t realize or intend the health consequences of smoking, but those consequences occurred, nonetheless. That’s the irony of this system that made possible the traditions of quality and neighborliness that Wendell describes in more than 50 books. 

We can’t understand the dysfunctions or potential regeneration of human society without understanding systems. Nobody gets out of bed in the morning with a goal of polluting rivers or increasing global temperatures. Yet those things happen as the result of what seem to be individually rational decisions. It’s a mistake to blame farmers who are producing what markets reward, just as it’s a mistake to blame corporate leaders enmeshed in a structure driven by competition for financial returns. Good people with worthy intentions live within what Wendell calls “the institutions.”

Dana Meadows (Limits to Growth, etc.)  had a constant refrain: “Blame the system, not the players. And, more importantly, reshape the system.” She wrote in Thinking in Systems that, “The future can’t be predicted, but can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.” And in another passage, “We are not helpless in the face of large systems. Systems can be watched, learned from, managed. We are not helpless.”

As Wendell says in one of his sabbath poems, “It all comes down to affection.” He wrote me in his final letter that “Like you, I’ve seen some of the light and have tried to live up to it.” 

Not long ago I visited farmers in Wisconsin, where 50 producer-led watershed groups are re-creating community as they share their steps toward regenerative agriculture. Their enthusiasm contrasts with the depression and suicides that haunt many farming communities. 

A second green revolution rooted in soil health depends on three legs: biology, money, and culture. Culture is frequently neglected. 

Dani Heisler, who manages the Wisconsin program, describes the essence of local groups as “social glue” that has developed as farmers renew each watershed. Such mutuality among farmers used to be widespread but has diminished.

Many years ago, I rounded a corner on my tractor in front of Mac’s Filing Station and a hen bounced out of my hay baler, squawking as if the sky were falling. The old men on the loafer’s bench in front of Mac’s had a story to tell. Everywhere I went for weeks, someone would come up and ask with a chuckle, “Hal, have you found your chicken yet?” The old hen had been setting a next of eggs in the baler, which had been parked in a barn for the winter.

We were a community. When I applied for my annual operating loan, my local banker paid scant attention to the forms I had filled out but instead asked about my kids. Now Mac’s filling station and its loafers’ bench are gone. So is the wood stove at the machinery dealer, around which we’d swap stories in the winter. Hundreds of farms have been replaced by a few dozen. The bank was bought out.

I could give a eulogy at Henry County’s funeral, a remembrance of neighbors working together. A eulogy is usually sad, and I have long been sad, but now I see how this eulogy could give way to vision.

Wendell Berry and his extended family were neighbors and friends of mine in Kentucky. Many of Wendell’s books can be read as eulogies, but their power is in their sense of possibility. I quote the following from Wendell’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities:

“For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. …As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy. … Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished.

…But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.”

A second green revolution based on soil health is emerging. Change in farming practices is slow because the risks are high. The process is not overnight. Dani Heisler and the Wisconsin farmers in watershed groups are taking one step at a time, not only innovating on the land but also creating a “social glue” among one another. They learn as they solve problems, supported by trusted advisors and modest financial support, and they’re doing this together in each local area.

A new institutional infrastructure underpins the transition, including state support and a recent investment from Nestle/Purina. These initiatives require money and elbow grease.

2025

I sometimes find myself caught up in clever certainty, and I’m not alone. Not always right but never in doubt.

My field of work is agriculture. I recently heard an iconic regenerative farmer comment that most farmers’ soil compaction problem is “the compaction between their ears.” No wonder he’s a lousy mentor for farmers just getting started on this journey. Disdain is the enemy of community, and community is essential to system change.

One of my favorite agronomist leaders told me that “farmers just need to join a new church.” As I thought about this, I realized that virtually nobody responds to entreaty from others to join a new church.

I’ve spent more than twenty years nudging and supporting sustainability professionals in food companies. They’re not always able to do what they wish they could do. But it doesn’t help for them to be hounded by social media nags who are never curious about the constraints within which others are bounded.

I was once working on federal legislation on behalf of a national coalition of farmers. I met with my Senator in Washington, and I thought I heard him agree to support what we were doing, but a few weeks later he voted against it. I blasted off an op-ed to the newspaper accusing the senator of hypocrisy. The next morning, I got a call from a friend who was my most important partner, the state senate majority leader, who told me I was foolish to have squandered this relationship in a fit of pique.

I can still be self-righteously indignant, and I know how to clothe indignance in the superiority of “knowing.” Sometimes this comes across as professorial arrogance. I want so much for people around me to be able to think in systems, understand feedback loops, and be relentlessly curious. All good capabilities, of course, but never developed in the face of disdain. People only grow within a container of respect.

Certainty and the ideological mind are viruses. Curiosity and community are antibiotics. Let’s create a shared story through damage to health.

With John Johnson (University of Arkansas) and Peter Senge, we wrote in December 2009: All learning involves assessment. Unless a person, group, or organization can gauge how they are doing relative to an aim, no learning is possible. Such assessment often is aided by quantitative measurement, especially when many people and even many different organizations are involved. But the goal is the learning, the improvement in outcomes achieved and building capacity for further improvement, not the measurement itself. Confusing ends and means leads to the naïve belief that metrics alone produce change, can lead to disappointing results from serious effort to improve metrics and can even make matters worse, such as when people spend time and resources improving metrics at the expense of confronting underlying problems and building healthier systems, or equally problematic, making important decisions based on sophisticated metrics but insufficient or inaccurate information.

This was published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review in Winter 2015 as an online supplement to The Dawn of System Leadership. It provides a firsthand look at how learning journeys, system mapping, and other practices have allowed system leaders to emerge from the Food Lab process.

This is an article I wrote with Peter Senge and John Kania that was published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in the Winter of 2015. The tagline is, “The deep changes necessary to accelerate progress against society’s most intractable problems require a unique type of leader–the system leader, a person who catalyzes collective leadership”

 

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton